What is wisdom?
What does it mean to be wise – to have wisdom? There is no perfect answer, even if we think wisdom is on our side. Cartoonists love to depict wisdom as a wise man (and it is usually a man) on top of a high mountain with the rest of humanity scratching their way up the mountain to attain wisdom. To some extent, that metaphor echoes the story of Moses going up the mountain to receive the 10 commandments. Or perhaps it reflects the body of wisdom sayings and teachings of Jesus that Matthew puts together in what we call the Sermon on the Mount. The author of psalm 111 puts it this way: “The root of wisdom is fear of the Lord” or as another translation puts it “The way to become wise is to honour God.” Another way of saying it in Christian terms is: “It is the Spirit working through Jesus that is at the root of all wisdom, a wisdom that draws us into relationship, into new being and believing, new thinking and doing.” Matthew Fox in his book “Creation Spirituality” includes a quote from Rabbi Herschel who says: “Awe is the beginning of wisdom.”
Awe is really at the root of the words of the psalmist, not fear as we would understand it. The psalmist stands in awe of great deeds of the past, of mercy and tenderness, of sustenance, of saving justice and faithfulness, of grace and mercy, of the wisdom that formed part of the covenant made with the one his people called Yahweh, Jehovah, Lord, God. Diarmuid O’Murchu uses as the title of one of his books the phrase “Ancestral Grace”. In some senses that is what the psalmist is talking about, the ancestral grace in their recent history that enabled his people to survive over many centuries. But for O’Murchu, ancestral grace goes back much deeper, to the beginning of time. O’Murchu writes: “Ancestral grace embodies an inexplicable affirmation of the will-tolife. Despite the paradoxes and extinctions and the ensuing chaos, life always wins out in the end.” He adds, “The wisdom of ancestral grace is so crucial for our future evolution that one can scarcely exaggerate its significance.”
It is in that ancestral grace that wisdom is to be found, as part of the activity of the Spirit of God that has enabled life to come into being and to continue on into the future.
As Christians, it is the Spirit working through Jesus that is at the root of all wisdom, that draws us into relationship, into new being and believing, new thinking and doing. So what does it mean to be wise? For us as Christians, it means following the way of Jesus through whom we see the spirit of life, the divine presence at work in the reality of human life. We begin to have wisdom when we can picture the immensity of creation, when we live in awe and wonderment at all that has gone into our being who we are here and now. We begin to have wisdom when we can begin to understand that there is more to wisdom than meets our intellectual eye.